Flowers From The Storm

AVON BOOKS

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AVON BOOKS

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

10 East 53rd Street

New York, New York 10022-5299

Copyright © 1992 by Amanda Moor Jay

ISBN: 0-380-76132-7

www.avonromance.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Avon Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

First Avon Books paperback printing: October 1992

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HarperCollins® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A. 10 9 8 7 6 5

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

He liked radical politics and had a fondness for chocolate. Five years ago, the Honorable Miss Lacy-Grey had verifiably swooned on the occasion of his requesting her hand for a country dance—an example of that category of incidents which one’s friends found endlessly amusing and became fond of recalling
ad nauseam
in their cups. The circulating quip had been that a marriage proposal would have crippled the girl for life, and an offer of a baser sort killed her on the spot.

Since Christian lay now with his head pillowed in the smooth curve of her back, his fingers indolently sliding between her stocking and her skin just above a blue-and-yellow garter, he had to assume that his friends had been slightly out in their predictions. She seemed perfectly alive to him. Her ankles crossed prettily, waving gently back and forth in the air above him.

He shaped his palm over her buttock, gave the dimple in the small of her back a kiss and sat up, leaning on his elbow. “When will Sutherland be home?”

“Not for a fortnight. At the very least.” The former Miss Lacy-Grey rolled over, smiling, exposing breasts that had grown heavier and the slight, swelling thickness at her waist. They’d been lovers for nigh three months. Christian passed his gaze over the subtle changes and lifted his lashes, saying nothing.

“I wish he would never come,” she said, twining her hands together above her head. “It’s been wonderful.”

“Better than chocolate,” he said.

“Really?”

He looked around, having reminded himself. The tall pot sat waiting; the kettle steamed softly on the hob. “Excuse me.” He pushed out of bed.

“You odious man.”

He gave her a sweeping bow and a wink, and helped himself to the kettle, pouring out boiling water into the cold milk, precisely half-and-half, scraping chocolate shavings into the pot and inserting the mill. The carpet felt cool and silken beneath his bare feet. He rubbed the tall mill handle vigorously between his hands—that ought to have been done over the fire, not in the pot, but conditions in the middle of the night in another man’s bedroom weren’t always ideal—and poured the frothy mix into a cup.

“How you can bring yourself to drink that without a grain of sugar defies the imagination,” she said.

“But you’re the sugar, my sweet,” he said promptly. He took a sip, standing naked next to the table.

“How else?”

She tried to make a jaded pout, but it turned into a smile. She stretched her hands upward again, sighing and arching in a provocative way, sliding her stockinged foot up and down the bed. “Oh, yes, I hope Sutherland never comes home.”

“You’d best have him home to bed you, my girl, and soon enough at that.”

She stared at her hands, and then lowered them. Her mouth gathered again into that appealing pucker.

“He won’t care.”

“Right-ho,” Christian said cynically.

She spread her palm on her increasing belly and slid a glance at him sideways.

He put down the chocolate and leaned across her, kissing her breast, tangling his hands in her hair and kissing her throat. “Worth it?” he murmured, very close to her ear.

She brought her arms up around his shoulders and held him tightly. The softness of her reawakened him.

He nuzzled his face into her skin, and while she clung to him as if she were drowning, he took advantage of the moment to tarnish her good character one more time. She seemed to enjoy it. God knew he did.

A single candle guttered at the base of the stairwell, illuminating the left arm and draperies of a marble copy of Ceres gazing down with an excess of sentimentality upon a sheaf of wheat. Christian moved discreetly on the stair, but not stealthily, having made his peace with the butler some weeks ago by the simple habit of leaving a neat stack of three yellow-boys by the candlestick as he let himself out. He was collecting them together in his pocket, feeling for the coins through his glove, when he heard the shuffle of a footstep from below. He paused at the landing, his hand on the rail.

“Edith?” A male voice drifted up, a faint echo in the hall.

The devil take it.

Christian stood utterly still. Lesley Sutherland walked out from beneath the stair, unbuttoning his greatcoat. “Eydie?” he said again, and smoothed his red sideburns as he looked up.

There was a clock ticking in the hall. Christian had never noticed it before, but at that moment of silence it was like a brazen, irrevocable tally.
One… two… three… four
…

At four it happened. The half-smile faded from Sutherland’s face. His lips parted. Christian expected nothing to come out, and nothing did: only silence, and Sutherland’s face going whiter and whiter, until his mouth clamped shut and color rushed up everywhere but in the carved lines beside his nose and around his lips.

Six… seven… eight…

Christian thought of several things to say, all of them facetious and directed at himself, except for the classic:
Home early, aren’t you
?

He kept them between his teeth. Sutherland still looked in a state of shock. An unpleasant tingling numbness in Christian’s right hand made him realize how hard he was gripping the stair rail through his glove. He let go, but the feeling of pins-and-needles grew worse and a strangeness seemed to wash over him, as if the stair beneath him shifted without moving.

He flexed his hand, open and closed.

The action seemed to focus Sutherland. He stared at Christian’s hand. “Jervaulx,” he said in an incongruously mild voice. “I’ll kill you for this.”

He even got the pronunciation wrong, the bumped-up Cit; too much
J
and
X
. In the eerie imbalance of the moment, Christian’s mind absurdly revolved over the proper sounds of his own title,
Shervoh
—

Shervoh
—
Shervoh
…

He said nothing, spreading his hand and squeezing his fingers into a fist again, which seemed something difficult to do. His arm felt heavy, somehow deadened, and his fingers itched and prickled down inside the bone.

“Your friends,” Sutherland said, a little louder, more aggressively. “Name your friends.”

“Durham. And Colonel Fane.” It was inevitable. But it surprised him that he felt so strange.

The clock ticked down another ten seconds while they looked at one another.

“You blackguard.
Get out of my house
!”

The shout came out half-strangled. Sutherland was so deep red, so throttled, that Christian thought he might burst and fall down in apoplexy.

“All right,” Christian said quietly. He moved down the stairs, past the other man, deliberately passive and reserved in his motions. Sutherland might wish to kill him, as was his right, but Christian had no particular desire to be the cause of the man dropping dead in his own hallway.

Besides that, he felt himself in need of fresh air. He felt drunk. His right hand still seemed dead and clumsy as he pulled open the door. He dragged it closed behind him with his left and stumbled, staggering against the iron railing at the doorstep.

The moon was full, lighting a patch of fog that lay at the base of the street: a blue mist fingering against the black row of houses, rising slowly. Christian held onto the rail, staring down the hill. Something definitely was wrong with him. He felt sick and dizzy and… strange. A wild thought that he’d been poisoned took hold of his mind.

Eydie? The chocolate. Would Eydie poison him? What the deuce for?

His heart beat at a great rate; he kept swallowing, trying to slow it, trying to think.

After a few moments, he let go of the rail. The cool air seemed to brace him. He drew deep breaths of it, and felt more himself. A dark shape lay at the foot of the front steps; he squinted at it, and realized it was his own hat.

He went down the steps and past it, and remembered again that it was his hat. The carriage waited for him two streets down. He stared uncertainly at the hat, then walked on. He couldn’t think why Eydie would poison him. It rather aggrieved him. But he felt better now, walking. Things settled themselves.

When he reached his brougham, his coachman got down quickly from the perch and held open the door.

Cass and Devil tumbled out, plumed tails wagging in elation. Christian leaned against the side of the carriage and allowed the dogs a jump apiece on him. He fondled their ears with one hand, called Devil back from sniffing along the coal holes in the sidewalk, and climbed inside. Cass lay down primly at Christian’s feet, but Devil inserted a spotted nose beneath his glove and insinuated himself onto the seat.

Christian stroked the setter’s head. As the carriage pulled away, he reached up to take off his hat and found that he had none.

He rested his head back on the seat. Sutherland. Sutherland wanted satisfaction.

Christian only wanted sleep. He flexed his right hand against the lingering, leaden weakness there. He thought drowsily that it was for once a convenient thing that he was left-handed, or he’d not be able to lift a pistol.

“I”ve yet to fathom it. No doubt I never will. How
canst
thou expect any real consideration from a person of his— Archimedea Timms paused, searching for a suitable word “—his
ilk
, Papa?”

“Wilt thou pour me a cup of tea, Maddy?” her father asked, in just the sort of amiable voice that left one with no room to start an effective argument.

“He is a duke, for one thing,” she said over her shoulder, parting shot as she marched through the back dining room to locate Geraldine, since the parlor bell was in disorder. The time it took to find the maidservant, see water drawn and sea to boil, and return to the parlor was not enough to make her forget the sequence of her thoughts. “A duke can scarcely be supposed to care seriously for such matters—the square in above thy left hand—as must be perfectly clear when his integration has not been prepared for the past week.”

“Thou shouldst not be impatient, Maddy. This sort of thing must be done with infinite care. He is taking his time, admire him for it.” Her father’s searching fingers found the carved wooden numeral two and slid it into place as an exponent of
s
.

“He is not taking his time, nor a bit of care. He is out and about the town, engaged in creaturely socializing. He has not the smallest regard for thy credit, nor his own.”